Veteran Education Week reporter Catherine Gewertz teams up with Liana Heitin, formerly a classroom teacher and reporter at Education Week Teacher, to bring you news and analysis of issues at the core of classroom learning.

The National Council of Teachers of English partners with nearly two dozen groups to launch a new national literacy center that will feature collaborative cross-disciplinary literacy work at a network of schools.

National guidelines for the study of foreign languages are being revised to make explicit the links to the common-core standards, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages announced this week. The news came just days before the council hosts its annual conference, with the theme "Empowering Language Educators Through Collaboration." The Nov. 18-20 convention is in Denver this year. The council has already issued a draft document on its website showing how the existing national standards for foreign languages, issued in 1996, align with the common standards in English/language arts and mathematics. In addition, the organization is ...

Chicago is reporting new college-readiness metrics to parents, such as schools' rates of student eligibility for "selective or highly selective" colleges. But the district isn't evaluating schools on that information yet.

Curriculum consultant Grant Wiggins writes that standards actually have three parts: the content students must know, the skills they must be able to perform, and examples of how well they should be able to demonstrate their knowledge.